The name of Lucio Colletti, one of postwar Italy’s leading Marxist philosophers, encapsulates the alternation between “progress” and “reaction” that the country has experienced since the fall of fascism.
Colletti himself had intense, firsthand experience of Italy’s economic and political growth after rising from the destruction of war to became a world industrial power by the mid-1960s.
His trajectory also symbolized the subsequent period of decline — economic, political, and cultural — as the country’s whole axis shifted to the right.
Between the two phases lay the protest movement of 1968, which was not just a student movement in Italy but also involved the country’s workers and lasted much longer than its counterparts in other Western countries. With his philosophical research and political militancy, Colletti helped prepare the Italian protests of 1968.
But he also contributed to the crisis of the radical left, later going on to support the liberal socialism of the Socialist prime minister Bettino Craxi before embracing the neoliberalism of Silvio Berlusconi. Colletti’s metamorphosis from Marxist theoretician in the 1950s and ’60s to right-wing parliamentarian for Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party in the 1990s is a complicated one that must be traced in detail.
Colletti’s early years were typical of young Italian intellectuals during the 1940s. During the resistance period, Colletti joined the Partito d’Azione. This was a highly influential group that included the supporters of Justice and Liberty, the anti-fascist…
Auteur: Giorgio Cesarale
